This invention relates generally to high power laser sources and, more particularly, to solid state lasers or fiber phased array lasers that are scalable to high powers. There is a significant need for high power laser sources for both military and industrial applications, such as directed energy weapons (DEW) systems, ladar and illuminators, as well as industrial cutting, welding and material processing. Scalable laser technologies under development fall into two principal categories: bulk crystal solid state lasers (SSL) and fiber phased array sources. In the bulk crystal group, slab lasers, rod lasers, disk lasers and heat capacity lasers are all under active consideration. In the fiber laser area, there are approaches that feature active near field beam control, far field beam control, passive beam combining using pulse code modulation (PCM) technology and nonlinear beam combining. The bulk crystal approaches suffer from thermo-optical distortions of the laser medium that render the output beams unacceptable, though fabrication of high power SSL devices has been demonstrated. Fiber array approaches, on the other hand, promise exquisite control of the output wavefront, but require control systems that are complex and to a large degree yet unproven.
Therefore, there is still a significant need to provide a high power laser source that avoids the drawbacks of the two principal approaches. Ideally, what is needed is a laser source scalable to high powers in the manner of solid state lasers, but retaining the desirable beam control features of fiber phased arrays. The present invention is directed to this end.